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It’s Nearly Impossible to Stay Unknown

The band Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, from left, Tim Koh, Kenny Gilmore and Ariel Pink. “Mature Themes,” the band’s new album, will be released on Tuesday.Credit
Piper Feguson

IF you believe the myth, Ariel Pink is home a lot.

On a Monday morning in July, Ariel Pink was idly wandering through his house in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, speaking by phone and giving a virtual tour. In the room where he sleeps, he said, an eight-track recorder was stationed on a shelf; in the living room he described a haphazard stack of instruments, guitars on top of keyboards on top of amplifiers.

The picture fit. Ariel Pink has a reputation as a bedroom artist — a “Hollywood hillbilly,” as one critic wrote, obsessively making hundreds of broken-down pop songs for no one in particular.

The truth, as the musician, born Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, explained, is a bit more complicated. “They’re really cheap keyboards and none of them work,” he said.

None of the instruments did. After years of recording at home, he now works miles away, in a converted studio downtown. The eight-track in the bedroom was in disarray, an unplugged monument to a past life. “This is a junk shop, to be totally honest,” he said.

On Tuesday, he and his band, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, will release “Mature Themes” (4AD), the latest willfully odd installment in a discography that has, over the last decade, come to serve as a kind of a thought experiment: What happens to a bedroom artist when the entire online universe is his bedroom? What becomes of the margins when they are, increasingly, just one click away from the center?

There was a time when Ariel Pink, 34, would have been a cult artist, an outsider known mostly by samizdat and word of mouth. He began recording in his father’s garage when he was a child. He sang songs of his own devising to his mother. And he knew just enough about music history to know, in the late ’90s, when he started documenting his noisy, fractured compositions in earnest, that no one would ever hear them.

“I was dead set on toiling in obscurity,” he said. “I didn’t think I had any future. I was recording experimental music that was just designed to alienate people.”

The lone savant making music for a tiny but fiercely loyal audience is an enduringly romantic rock archetype. Think of Jandek, the shadowy Houston artist who has released more than 60 LPs of discordant folk, available by mail order via an anonymous post office box.

Ariel Pink has collaborated with R. Stevie Moore, another quixotic soul whose hundreds of ambitiously overstuffed low-fidelity albums — released since the late ’60s in flurries of reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and CD-Rs — overwhelm even Mr. Moore’s ability to count them. And on “Mature Themes,” Ariel Pink and the Los Angeles vocalist DâM-FunK cover “Baby,” the gently soulful 1979 single from Joe and Donnie Emerson, two teenage brothers who recorded a lost, recently reissued album of winsome pop in a home-built studio in the distant town of Fruitland, Wash.

This is Ariel Pink’s lineage. But unlike the majority of his predecessors, he’s found a sizable audience: the result of good luck — an early demo he passed to the band Animal Collective led to a contract with the group’s label, Paw Tracks — and better timing. His first Paw Tracks release, “The Doldrums,” came out in 2004, right as the old cognoscenti were reorganizing themselves into new and more robustly connected communities online. Ariel Pink spent the rest of that decade releasing his old bedroom tapes, repackaged as new releases.

In 2010, Pitchfork gave his Haunted Graffiti’s first album of freshly recorded material, “Before Today” (4AD), its coveted Best New Music designation. The site went on to name the band’s sleepily nostalgic “Round and Round” the No. 1 song of that year.

In another era, not too far gone, this would have been an almost unthinkable outcome. As an undergraduate at first the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then the California Institute of the Arts, Ariel Pink lugged plastic shopping bags full of cassette tapes of his music from apartment to apartment. “I just stared at them for hours and hours, trying to invoke some sort of juju in them,” willing the unloved recordings “into some sort of posterity,” he remembered.

A decade later, he has sold tens of thousands of records. He’s toured the world. He has even, as he made a point of noting, made friends along the way. “I’ve been a social person for a long time now,” he said.

Photo

Ariel Pink, left, and Kenny Gilmore from the band Haunted Graffiti, performing at a music festival in Chicago in 2011.Credit
Mylan Cannon/The New York Times

Ariel Pink’s journey out of the shadows and into the light is perhaps a familiar story, but it also signals a rare sea change, a permanent shift in the way music functions at the margins. “Mature Themes” is in many ways a deeply silly record. Ariel Pink has a dreamy, old-fashioned way with melody. But he’s also prone to jarring interjections, switching without ceremony from a smooth Donny Osmond croon to campy impersonations of daffy robots and soap-opera vampires. His music, rooted in the sweet, sunny pop of AM radio, invites you in and pushes you away in equal measure. “My name is Ariel,” he croons on one song. “And I’m a nympho.”

Ariel Pink is, in other words, still very much a cult artist — his cult just happens to be bigger than anything artists like Jandek, who yielded and began playing live shows in 2004, or Mr. Moore, who lately has become an enthusiastic and very public denizen of the Internet, could have ever imagined.

“There are actually social media tools in place that allow for cults to build and reach critical mass a lot more quickly,” said Mark Richardson, the editor in chief of the music site Pitchfork. Reclusive artists like Jandek and Mr. Moore used to be at the mercy of their own idiosyncrasies — they gradually gathered far-flung fans by mail or in the dusty corners of specialty record shops, or not at all. “Whereas I feel like now people can find each other and the momentum can build much easier,” Mr. Richardson said.

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Ariel Pink has “definitely proven that,” Mr. Richardson added. “Because his music is just as weird.”

Ariel Pink’s story is, in part, a story about the medium that rescued him from obscurity. The Web transcends geography and makes no distinction between homemade products and studio-slick productions; it has provided an opportunity for a critical mass of listeners to coalesce around an idea or sound, no matter how strange or improbable. As a result, the last few years have seen an onslaught of reunions and reissues: underappreciated artists, like Mr. Moore, returning in search of an audience, determined to take advantage of a niche friendly Internet and the critical apparatus that has grown up along with it.

“I always expected that magic phone call to come and it never did,” Mr. Moore said. But lately there has been a new surge of interest in his work, aided in part by Ariel Pink, who has singled out Mr. Moore as an inspiration — “He constantly drops my name,” Mr. Moore said, sounding grateful — and by Pitchfork, which featured a disheveled, ebullient Mr. Moore on a recent episode of its YouTube show.

Rather than dubbing cassettes or burning CD-Rs, Mr. Moore now uploads new music to Facebook. Last year, after more than 40 lonely years of making music at home, he embarked on his first tour.

“Here’s this white-bearded grandpa shaking his booty on stage,” Mr. Moore said, laughing. “It’s an incredible thing that’s happened. I can’t even begin to compare it to how it used to be because all it was then was failure.”

For those like Mr. Moore, and for the curious listeners just now coming into contact with his music, this is a welcome development. But it’s a melancholy one, too — the great romantic archetype of the lone, obsessive musician, the outsider artist, is in all likelihood a thing of the past.

In 2012, a certain kind of cultivated obscurity has become its own niche — a selling point, even.

“Artists crop up who try to position themselves that way, but it only really lasts two weeks,” Mr. Richardson said. “You’re like, ‘Who is this guy?’ And then four months later he’s got his first show at the Cake Shop. And the next year he’s playing Coachella, and he probably” is atrocious live (Mr. Richardson used a stronger phrase).

Ariel Pink, for his part, has long since moved out of the bedroom, even as his music continues to sound, in form if not fidelity, like it’s been made there. “This place is kind of like a museum of sorts,” he said about his house. He’s still an outsider, but one with a comfortable role on the inside; being weird, an adjective he embraces, is a lot easier than it used to be.

“Mature Themes” was recorded in five leisurely months this last winter in a downtown Los Angeles studio with a professional band and professional equipment and Ariel Pink has professional aspirations for it — fame, fortune, or maybe even a licensing deal with “a movie or something.”

Which is not to say that his audience should expect a particularly listener-friendly album. “I think that with the new record, it’s like 10 steps back,” he said, wryly.

“If people are into it,” he added, “they’re weirder than I am.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2012, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Nearly Impossible to Stay Unknown. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe